In a graphics system, power is consumed when executing shaders for processing a graphics application. A graphics application may have many individual shaders, and each pixel shading operation consumes power. Additionally, power is consumed for any accesses to external memory required by the shading process.
A drawback of many graphics processing schemes is that the graphics system often must be designed to support the shading requirements for high end games and other applications requiring high resolution. Thus, the graphics processing unit may consume considerable power even when less complex graphical images are being rendered.